"Still and Still Moving"

Judith Trepp, Untitled, 2009, egg tempera, oil, and oil stick on linen, 35.5 x 43.2 inches

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

 Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

This is the conclusion of "East Coker," the second of Eliot's "Four Quartets."

Read my previous "East Coker" excerpt here.

Ed. note: Eliot's poem is left-justified.